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(AP Photo/Evan Vucci) President Trump walks to his vehicle after speaking with reporters about firing Reince Priebus and naming John Kelly as his new chief of staff on July 28, 2017. I was on the phone with my mother, reading an article to her from my laptop when a news alert darted onto my screen. Anthony Scaramucci, the just-appointed White House director of communications, had resigned. It was a rather meta moment, as the piece I was reading to my mother was Ryan Lizza’s write-up for The New Yorker of his extraordinary July 27 telephone conversation with the Mooch, which was quite a thing to share with one’s octogenarian mom, what with all the expletives and a description of a contortionist, onanistic sex act attributed to a less-than-fit fellow. But, hey, she’s a big girl, and besides, we’re from Jersey. “It’s like he swept up the weavings from the floor,” she said of President Donald J. Trump, “and put them in offices.” Initially, The New York Times reported , the president was...

(AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster) President Trump speaks at the 2017 National Scout Jamboree in Glen Jean, West Virginia, on July 24, 2017. I n Washington these days, a simple question once regarded as a mere pleasantry has become quite loaded: “How are you?” “Well, you know …” comes the answer, and it falls off right there, sometimes with a weary roll of the eyes or a downward glance. Yeah, I know. I know how it is to want to scream or cry as the republic slips away and you’re still trying to do your work, trying to stop some small part of it from happening while the nation seems oblivious to the consequences. I know. We have sunk so low that we must defend a racist, sexist, homophobic, lock-’em-up-and-throw-away-the-key attorney general from the president’s attempt to push him from power —apparently so that the president may find a new attorney general better situated to shut down an investigation by a special counsel into whether he colluded with a foreign adversary to rig the last...

(AP Photo/Jacqueline Martin) Attorney General Jeff Sessions at the Justice Department's National Summit on Crime Reduction and Public Safety in Bethesda, Maryland, on June 21, 2017. I n a speech delivered behind closed doors to an anti-LGBT hate group, the attorney general of the United States held forth with his philosophy of religious freedom. It wasn’t “the government’s job to immanentize the eschaton,” he said. The reason we know that is an actual thing that Jeff Sessions said—or at least planned to say—in his July 11 speech to the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) is that Buzzfeed’s Dominic Holden prepared a Freedom of Information Act request to obtain the speech, which apparently prompted the Department of Justice to release the text, as prepared for delivery, to a right-wing website, The Federalist . The ADF earned is classification as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center for its work as “a legal advocacy and training group that specializes in supporting the...

(AP Photo/Alex Brandon) Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, accompanied by Senators John Barrasso, John Thune, and Majority Whip John Cornyn, on April 25, 2017 T o call Donald Trump and his administration corrupt and mendacious is to make the most obvious of statements. Too easy, really. Because if Trump and his boys have tread the path toward treason, so too has the entire Republican Party. It was a busy Tuesday night. As the president’s son and capo bastone Donald Trump Jr. took to the airwaves to defend his meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer during the presidential campaign on the tantalizing possibility of gleaning opposition research on Hillary Clinton, word broke that the president and his team together crafted a false statement about the nature of that meeting, issued under Junior’s name and delivered to The New York Times . It was later revealed that the Rob Goldstone , the meeting’s broker, made clear in an email to Trump Jr., a prominent surrogate in the Trump campaign...

(AP Photo/Andrew Harnik) White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders talks to the media on June 5, 2017, at the White House. I f there were ever a doubt that a traitor now occupies the Oval Office, Tuesday’s assault on the exercise of a free press, guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States, should dispel it. This particular attack was prompted by a screw-up at CNN, a favorite punching-bag for President Donald J. Trump, but was quickly extended to the whole of the political press. It’s a timeworn strategy of authoritarian regimes. As Jill Lepore recounted in the June 5 issue of the The New Yorker , Edmund Taylor, writing in 1940 of Nazi strategy in France, reported on “the propaganda campaign waged by Nazi agents to divide the French people, by leaving them uncertain about what to believe, or whether to believe anything at all.” CNN’s June 24 retraction of a story about Anthony Scaramucci, a hedge fund billionaire and member of the Trump transition team whom the...